A great deal more than DNA sequencing is going on in the bioinformatics field, but the cost of sequencing seems to have become the chip speed of that industry - a commonly used measure for present capabilities and speed of progress. "The goal now being pursued by the N.I.H. and by several manufacturers [is] to drive the costs of decoding a human genome down to as little as $1,000. At that price, it could be worth decoding people's genomes in certain medical situations and, one day, even routinely at birth. ... As we drop the price and increase the capability, there are applications that couldn't be done before, [like] a researcher being able to screen a thousand patients for cancer mutations." We're heading for a real influx of information; vast, ever-growing databases to accelerate medical research and spur development of new technologies to engineer longer healthy life spans.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/18/science/18dna.html?pagewanted=all